Seeking lower cost alternatives to Berkeley Audio Design Alpha USB converter


I am looking for a USB to optical audio converter.
The Alpha USB from Berkeley Audio Design is an external asynchronous USB to S/PDIF (or AES) interface. It's strictly a D to D converter accepting USB digital audio input and delivering digital audio output.
That's the type of product I'm looking for. However, at $1,895 the Berkeley Alpha USB is far more expensive than most similar products I've seen. Some of these products sell for less than $100.

I'm on a budget. Can anyone recommend one of the lower priced alternatives to the Alpha USB from Berkeley Audio Design?
lowoverdrive
The output of your PC, via Ethernet, goes to the Raspberry Pi , which uses the Pi2AES to reclock and generate clean digital streams from the bits, that came over the Ethernet port.

It uses your PC and the Pi, this way, to feed your DAC this rather nice stream, rather than the much noisier USB stream which the DAC has to deal with normally.

You can if you want just hook a USB drive to the Pi and eliminate the PC entirely, but you will need a different OS on the Pi to handle that kind of setup.
@pengun - thanks. I have another question.

> The output of your PC, via Ethernet, goes to the Raspberry Pi

Is that part handled by mpd (Music Player Daemon, https://www.musicpd.org/)?

What OS/software do you run on your Pi? Volumio?

Where are the instructions for setting this up as far as what software is running on the PC, etc.?
Thank you.


I dunno. The Pi2AES guy recommends RoPieee which runs headless, meaning no interface.

As I have not got my cable yet I have not set it up and figured it out. For me it should just be UPnP DLNA used with Foobar, or that is my intention anyway.

I don’t stream stuff, I just need to get my files off my NVMe drive, through the Pi Bridge, to the Pi2AES, which normally outputs on all outputs, to my DAC.

I have not seen detailed instructions but I was a Linux sysadmin for some years, so I expect I can get it all to do what I want. As I have not yet, I have no real useful advice, outside of searching. I did not look very hard once I figured out what was going on.

You could email the guy at Pi2AES and ask, he might have a good idea where to look for good instructions. I’ll know in a week or so, at present mail pace. ;(
The hardest part so far has been Win 10 networking. I had to find just the right Intel driver, and I have to trick that into giving me what I want.
@pengun - thanks. I hope to hear more from you in a week or so.

I don’t stream either. My intention is similar to yours except all my devices run Linux.

Here’s the list of Pi software I know about so far:

- [moOde™ audio player](https://moodeaudio.org/) - seems to be completely free & open source. Good reviews. Some say it is superior to Volumio.
- [Volumio - The Audiophile Music Player](https://volumio.org/) - free version has limited features- [RoPieee | Software](https://ropieee.org/software/) - seems to be free
- [RoPieee | XL](https://ropieee.org/xl/) - not sure if this is a premium feature
- MPD+Rompr
- [Mopidy](https://mopidy.com/) - Mopidy plays music from local disk, Spotify, SoundCloud, TuneIn, and more. You can edit the playlist from any phone, tablet, or computer using a variety of MPD and web clients.
- [Pi MusicBox - A Spotify, SoundCloud, Google Music player for the Raspberry Pi, with remote control](https://www.pimusicbox.com/) - based on Mopidy.- [musikcube](https://musikcube.com/)- [RuneAudio for Raspberry Pi](http://www.rpimusicplayer.com/)- [Patchbox OS - Raspberry Pi OS for Audio Projects](https://blokas.io/patchbox-os/)- [MinimServer features](https://minimserver.com/features.html)- [GitHub - airsonic/airsonic: Airsonic, a Free and Open Source community driven media server (fork of Subsonic and Libresonic)](https://github.com/airsonic/airsonic)
- [openmediavault - The open network attached storage solution](https://www.openmediavault.org/)- [Music Player Daemon](https://www.musicpd.org/) - Raspbian version available. Works with tons of clients: https://www.musicpd.org/clients/